Dave Bonta's "The Hollow (43)" begins with a shrug at the very idea of precision: "200 years old / or ten thousand." The gap between those numbers is enormous, and the speaker doesn't mind. The poem is about a patch of woodland whose age and shape can't be pinned down by ordinary figures, and about the odd, bodily, living measurements that work better. The number in the title suggests one entry in a longer sequence, but the poem stands perfectly well alone.
Nothing here is argued. The poem is a string of observations, and almost none has a main verb. "Former road/streambed" is just a noun phrase, and the slash does a lot of work. It refuses to decide whether this was a road or a watercourse, or perhaps both at different times. Either way, the ground is a record of use and erosion. The title word "hollow" fits: a place worn down into a dip by water, feet, or time.
The most striking image comes next: a "rhododendron trunk / bare as high as a starving deer's / neck can stretch." The comparison measures the plant against an animal's body, and the verse form imitates the gesture. The sentence stretches over three lines and runs on without a pause, so the reader's eye reaches upward as the deer's neck would. The adjective "starving" adds hunger and pressure to what could have been a neutral description. We learn what happened here from the evidence left on the trunk. The poem never shows a deer, only a clean line where the leaves stop.
The next stanza plays with the idea of measurement most openly: "elevation measured / by the number of unripe / spikenard berries." Elevation normally belongs to maps and instruments, but here it is a matter of counting small green fruit. Judging by the imagery, the speaker is walking uphill and reading the slope through the plants. The word "unripe" matters too. It suggests something unfinished and still in process, and the poem keeps returning to that idea. The line breaks are careful. "By the number of unripe" hangs open for a moment, and the odd, specific "spikenard berries" lands as the payoff. The rare plant name does what a precise detail should: it makes the scene feel observed rather than imagined.
Then comes the quietest and most unsettling phrase: "slow-creeping slope." The hyphenated compound turns a hillside into something alive, a creature that moves too slowly to see. The final stanza shows the result: "all the tree boles curved / to keep their balance." "Boles" is an old, earthy word for trunks, and it gives the ending a weight that "trunks" would not. The trees bend because the ground moves, and the bending is how they stay upright. The ending has a quiet moral, though the poem never states one: balance is a continuing adjustment to forces, not a fixed position.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and no punctuation. The line lengths vary sharply, from the clipped "former road/streambed" to the long, stretched deer-neck sentence. That variety suits its subject, since nothing in the hollow is regular. The poem also leaves out the speaker. There is no "I," no feeling stated, no lesson announced. The attention itself is the emotion. Even the main images share a quality: bare trunk, creeping slope and curved trees are all records of slow change, as though the landscape were a text written by hunger, gravity and years.
What makes the poem worth reading is how it changes the idea of knowing a place. At the start, human numbers fail: two centuries or ten thousand years, who can say? The poem then offers better instruments, a deer's reach, a count of berries, the lean of a tree. These are less exact but truer, because they come from the place itself. In a few dozen words, the poem suggests that to understand a landscape you may have to measure it by what lives and struggles there.